The relationship between marketing and sales
We all know that when marketing and sales work together, everyone benefits. Yet in many businesses these two vital revenue generating departments either work independently to each other or are in constant conflict and unaligned. Research finds that organisations who do tightly align sales and marketing functions enjoy 38% higher sales win rates.
With that in mind, businesses need to consider the different personalities, drivers and goals of both departments. By understanding these, you’ll have a better ability to align your marketing and sales teams for success.
Communication
Keep the lines of communication between both departments open.
Sales should be aware of what marketing activities are taking place and marketing should be aware of how sales are going to activate the marketing. Research shows that B2B companies’ inability to align sales and marketing teams’ costs 10% or more of their revenue per year.
Encouraging your marketing team to be thinking and asking, “what can we do to make the job of the sales team easier?” And on the other side encouraging your sales team to be thinking about how and what to report back to marketing, for example which assets are working, is there any valuable customer feedback, what can we learn from a marketing campaign based on sales metrics.
Strategy
Does your business have a clearly defined revenue generation strategy that everyone within your sales and marketing teams understand and are aligned to? All teams should be aligned to this strategy which is ultimately driving activity within each team.
Understanding your ideal customer is the first fundamental step in a successful strategy. Developing buyer personas and reassessing them on an ongoing basis will enrich the activity that is executed in all departments of the business. Research shows that 71% of companies who exceed revenue and lead goals have documented personas. Once you have this in place you can target your personas, encourage prospects to engage with you online, build brand awareness, direct traffic to your website and build an online community around your business.
Goal Alignment
At the very least sales and marketing should be working towards the same revenue goals. Both should have visibility of each other’s strategy and targets, with plenty of opportunity to communicate between the two on activity, successes, the ideal customer journey and campaign plans.
The ideal scenario is for the two departments to work hand in hand, to move the prospects through the sales cycle. Having a sales and marketing handoff officially documented will help this. A handoff acts as an agreement between marketing and sales around key handover items such as:
- Categorised leads
- Confirmed vocabulary for lead status
- Defining jurisdictions between the departments
This includes understanding how you classify the lead status depending on their actions (such as high interest low fit, high interest good fit, low interest good fit, low interest bad fit), at which point marketing hands a lead to sales and at which stage sales hands a lead back to marketing if it is not ready to convert or needs further nurturing.
Having this documented encourages a smooth and efficient lead handling process aligned to the goals for both departments.
Success
To be truly successful, sales and marketing must align, working to support each other. Behind every great sales team there is a set of marketing processes and principles being implemented. For your marketing activity to be truly successful there must be a sales process ready to activate it.